System and method for communicating data

Abstract

The present invention provides a system and method for communicating data between a source application process and one or more destination application processes. This system and method perform conversion and routing functions which require only a single conversion of all outbound transmissions regardless of the variety of destinations, and only a single conversion of all inbound transmissions regardless of the variety of sources. The functions also enable changes, additions, and deletions of sources and destinations of transmissions to be made without modification of a source or destination application process and without taking a source or destination application process off-line. The functions further enable this system and method to be implemented in virtually any enterprise architecture without requiring that each processing system of the architecture be custom built. These conversion and routing functions are performed by first receiving data to be transmitted in a source format from a source application. This data are then converted from the source format to a standard format. Next, one or more destinations are identified in a database using a transaction type corresponding to the data and / or the address of the source application. After identifying the one or more destinations, a copy of the data is transmitted to each and the data are then converted from the standard format to a destination format. Lastly, this converted data are passed to the destination process.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]This invention relates to systems and methods for communicating data. More particularly, this invention relates to systems and methods for communicating data between a source process and one or more destination processes, in which data are converted from a source format to a standard format, the data are routed from the source process to the one or more destination processes, the data are converted from the standard format to a destination format for each destination process, and receipt of the data is verified at each destination process.[0002]Integrated processing architectures in which a variety of processing systems communicate with each other over a communication network are widely used in commerce. Because of the different communication requirements of each processing system in such architectures, it is frequently necessary to incorporate multiple translation processes into each transmitting or receiving processing system to translate outgoing ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The present invention provides a system and method for communicating data between a source process and one or more destination processes without the need for a separate translator on each system for each data format type. The system performs uniform conversion and routing functions, allowing for changes, additions, and deletions of sources and destinations of data transmissions without modifying the source or destination application process or taking it offline. The system also includes a receipt acknowledgement function to confirm data transmission has occurred. The technical effects of the invention include improved efficiency, flexibility, and scalability for data communication in enterprise architectures."

Problems solved by technology

This necessity becomes particularly burdensome as the variety of source transmission formats or destination transmission formats increases for any processing system.

Another disadvantage with these architectures is that changing, adding, and / or removing sources and / or destinations for data transmissions is difficult because the application processes that generate each copy of the transmissions generated and that perform the corresponding translations, must be modified.

These modifications may be particularly problematic to the extent that they introduce potential flaws into the application processes and that they require the modified applications to be taken off-line while being altered.

A further disadvantage with these architectures is that each architecture is usually unique from enterprise to enterprise because of the unique needs and desires of the enterprises, and, therefore, each architecture must be custom built at significant expense in both time and money.

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